Identitäten / Identities. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven
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Identitäten / Identities Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven herausgegeben von Marlene Bainczyk-Crescentini Kathleen Ess Michael Pleyer Monika Pleyer unter Mitarbeit von Teresa Anna Katharina Beisel Cosima Stawenow Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie. Detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet abrufbar über http://dnb.ddb.de. © 2015 Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg Plöck 107–109, 69117 Heidelberg www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de Satz und Gestaltung: Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg / Cosima Stawenow Umschlaggestaltung: Heidelberger Graduiertenschule für Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY SA 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Umschlagabbildung: © Dr911 | Dreamstime.com – Human Head Silhouette With Set Of Gear Photo Online verfügbar über den Heidelberger Dokumentenserver HeiDOK: http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/18089 Inhaltsverzeichnis Vorwort 7 Einleitung 11 Introduction 19 Lisa Freigang 25 Identity and Violence Sectarian Conflict in Post-Independence Indian Literature Anne Franciska Pusch 39 Literary Animals and the Problem of Anthropomorphism Monika Pleyer 57 Identities and Impoliteness in Harry Potter Novels Susana Rocha Teixeira und Anita Galuschek 77 „Tell me what you don’t like about yourself“ Personale Identitätskonstruktion in der US-amerikanischen makeover culture im 21. Jahrhundert am Beispiel der Serie Nip/Tuck Nicolas Frenzel 95 Werteidentitäten und Konsistenzverständnis einzelner Werte Sabrina Valente 125 Rechtstexte als Kultur- bzw. Identitätseinheiten Teresa Anna Katharina Beisel 145 Organisationsidentität im Kontext wohlfahrtssystemischer Strukturen Erin Rice 169 Patterned Identity: Textiles and Traces of Modernity in Contemporary Nigerian Art Andreja Malovoz 191 Late Bronze Age Place-Based Identity in Županjska Posavina Erin Rice Patterned Identity: Textiles and Traces of Modernity in Contemporary Nigerian Art 1. Introduction In the global arena of contemporary arts, artists outside Africa who are associated with African art—whether this term accurately applies to them or not—have become acutely aware over the past decades of the importance of performing their African identities. This “performance” is played out for Western audiences who already have a preconceived notion of what they expect to see. This expectation is structured in part by the precedent set by artists within Africa working in the years around the shift to independence, and in part by ideas about an authenticity of Africa and African art that are based less on reality than on the West’s fantasies of an exotic place whose artists delve deeply into issues of the post-colonial condition.1 One of the ways artists have explored their African identities and heritage, whether in response to the Western expectation or not, is to use textiles as media and subject matter in their work. As I will argue in the following paragraphs, the use of textiles by contemporary artists allows for a complex confrontation with personal and cultural identity that is realizable because the histories of Africa’s textiles reveal a globally interconnected web of trade, cultural interaction, transfer, and mobility that challenges commonly held ideas about Africa and the authenticity of identity. 1 For an in depth discussion of this issue, see the essay “Double Dutch and the Culture Game” in Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 33–44. 170 — Erin Rice The mobility of textiles themselves, as well as their patterns, is something that has not received sufficient scholarly attention, but has the potential to shed new light on the works of art in which textiles are incorporated, and vice versa. By revisiting the work of two Nigerian modernist artists, Bruce Onobrakpeya and Nike Okundaye, both of whom used the Yoruban adire textile in their work, I use their precedents to set the stage for a discussion of the appropriation of Dutch wax-print fabrics by the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, and the discrepancies between the various appropriations. I will show through the work of these other artists that the analyses of Shonibare’s work, which have focused on the authenticity of the fabrics he uses and his own identity, come undone when applied to similar textile-based artwork. A brief history of the Dutch wax-print and a more detailed account of adire will foreground these discussions, with special attention given to the mobile nature of fabrics and their patterns. Finally, I will introduce the work of a Lagos-based American artist, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, whose work explores themes of communication and memory as they relate to the experiences of current-day migration and identity using textiles native to her father’s Nigerian and Yoruba culture. 2. Adire: A brief history Adire, meaning “tie-dye” in the Yoruba language, was produced by the Yoruba before European cotton arrived in West Africa.2 It was made with a locally spun and woven cotton textile that tended to have a rough and uneven surface texture. The arrival of white cotton sheeting from Britain was an ideal substitute for local cotton in the production of adire. Rather than wipe out indigenous textile production, imported cotton caused a burgeoning of adire in the late 19th and early 20th century. The smooth, even surface of machine-produced cotton was ideal for adire techniques that involved painting a resist agent onto the cloth, or stitching or tying 2 It is not known with certainty when indigo or resist dyeing was first practiced in the region, but the earliest evidence dates resist dyeing of threads and the use of indigo to the 17th century. However, adire as we know it today was first produced in the first few decades of colonization when European machine made cotton fabric replaced the local handwoven fabric used in adire production. See Judith Byfield, “Innovation and Conflict: Cloth Dyers and the Interwar Depression in Abeokuta, Nigeria,” The Journal of African History 38, no. 1 (1997): 79. Textiles and Traces of Modernity in Contemporary Nigerian Art — 171 ornate designs with an intricacy and detail that was not achievable with the coarser hand-woven cotton. Adire oniko, for example, is created through a painstaking process of sewing small sacs of fabric with raffia to create a stunning pattern of concentric circles of small rings (fig. 1).3 Such patterns required great skill and days of labor but the cloths were in high demand. Thus, adire production became a creative and lucrative artistic enterprise that at times employed almost entire towns or villages, partic- ularly in the Southwestern town of Abeokuta.4 This region was an active exporter of raw cotton and other commodities to Europe. Therefore, the infrastructure necessary to facilitate the textile trade was already in place when the region became an importer of European woven cotton. As demand for adire increased and stretched across West Africa, the industry helped Abeokuta and its residents integrate into and benefit from the global economy. Moreover, once the adire producers were exclusively using imported cloth, the need for cotton spinners and weavers, tasks typically undertaken by men, was eliminated. The women who dyed the cloth, on the other hand, found themselves in a position where they were benefitting financially, socially, and politically from the circumstances that left them as the sole producers and beneficiaries ofadire ’s profits.5 3. The Influence of theAdire Industry on Women The economic benefits afforded to women through adire’s success were critical to events that unfolded in Abeokuta during colonial rule. Women dyers experienced unprecedented affluence and independence at adire’s peak, lending to a sense of agency and an urge to protect themselves and their market from political changes. Thus around 1920 when the adire industry began to decline, women took their grievances to the local representative (the Alake), not simply for the sake of the industry but also for the rights of women.6 The leader of a women’s group in the Nigerian town of Abeokuta, Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, decided to lead 3 Nancy Stanfield, Jane Barbour, and Doig Simmonds, Adirẹ Cloth in Nigeria: the Preparation and Dyeing of Indigo Patterned Cloths among the Yoruba (Ibadan, Nigeria: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 1971), 51–56. 4 Byfield, “Innovation and Conflict,” 80–81. 5 Judith Byfield, The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Dyers in Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1890–1940 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002), xxvii. 6 Byfield, “Innovation and Conflict,” 90–93. 172 — Erin Rice her group to the streets to protest the latest changes inflicted by the colonial government. At Kuti’s suggestion, the women all dressed the same in Yoruban style attire, which undoubtedly included but was not limited to adire wrappers, head ties, and white blouses. The idea was to conceal the economic, social, and educational inequities between these women in order to unite them against the governing powers.7 In the face of newly imposed taxes and restrictions on their economic powers, and a declining industry, the women who produced adire found themselves in an unprecedented position of political agency that was both fueled by their industry and voiced through the visual language of textiles. Adire was part of a critical moment of juncture between the colonial power and the Yoruban people of Nigeria’s southwest. Despite the